18-02-2025
Gil Won-ok, memory keeper of wartime sex slavery by Japan, dies at 96
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Japan and South Korea signed an agreement in 2015 that included an apology by Japan and restitution for the sexual enslavement of Korean women, but the historical trauma remains a lingering wound for many South Koreans and a sensitive diplomatic point of tension between the two nations.
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Ms. Gil and other survivors believed that Japan had not done enough to take full responsibility for the abuses against civilian women. She joined weekly protests outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, where a bronze statue of a seated young women next to an empty chair represents the ordeal faced by Ms. Gil and others.
'We were born human but haven't been able to live like humans,' Ms. Gil said during a 2010 demonstration in Tokyo, filmed as part of the documentary 'The Apology' (2016) by filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung. 'I will keep on talking until the day I die.' Nearby, a group of Japanese protesters jeered Ms. Gil and others, calling them 'prostitutes.'
The collective memory of the 'comfort women' stayed mostly buried until the early 1990s, when the first survivors came forward with their stories of being trapped in brothels for Japanese soldiers in areas such as China's northern Manchuria, where Japanese forces invaded in 1931.
Ms. Gil first spoke publicly in 1998 about her experiences after seeing television coverage of the Seoul protests outside the Japanese Embassy, which began six years earlier. 'I had never even heard of the term 'comfort woman' before,' she said in an oral history in 2004 recorded by history students at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. 'I only described my experiences as subhuman treatment.'
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Her account began in 1940 when she was 12 in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. Her father, who owned a scrap yard, was arrested on charges of selling stolen items, she said.
Ms. Gil left school and briefly attended classes in the Korean tradition of gisaeng, women trained in singing and arts who entertained at upper-crust events. A friend, Ms. Gil recalled, suggested they try to find jobs in Manchuria.
'I was too immature to realize what the repercussions would be,' she said in the oral history. 'I just wanted to earn the [money] to release my father from jail.'
Ms. Gil thought she might find work as a singer or bar hostess. She was almost immediately coerced into a brothel, where she said she was raped by Japanese soldiers hour after hour. Months later, she was diagnosed with syphilis. Japanese doctors, she said, tied her fallopian tubes, leaving her unable to get pregnant. 'I was crippled by the age of 14,' she said.
She was sent back to Korea to recover, she recalled. Jobs were scarce, and she said her family lived on small amounts of millet and scrounged firewood to keep warm. In desperation, Ms. Gil decided in 1942 to try again in Japanese-occupied China, hoping this time to avoid the brothel operators.
Her mother, she said, gave her a traditional Korea outfit with a long green skirt to impress prospective bosses. 'I was a fool,' Ms. Gil recalled. Like before, she was soon forced into a brothel and given a Japanese name.
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'There was no freedom,' he recalled in the oral history. 'No one was allowed to go anywhere. There was nothing I could do when the men came in.' When she resisted, she said, she was beaten. One soldier slashed the top of her head with a knife, she said.
After Japan's surrender to end World War II, Ms. Gil boarded a ship that docked in Incheon, near what is now South Korea's capital, Seoul. When communist North Korea invaded the South in 1950, touching off the Korean War, Ms. Gil was still in the Seoul area and became cut off from her family on the other side of the border.
Ms. Gil's activism included co-founding the Butterfly Fund with another survivor of the WWII brothels, Kim Bok-dong, to aid victims of sexual abuse during wars around the world.
'How could I not hold a grudge against those people who did this to me?' Ms. Gil said.
Gil Won-ok was born in Huichon, now part of North Pyongan Province in late 1928, with some South Korean groups noting her birth date as Nov. 30. The family moved to Pyongyang when she was a child. Her mother had a street stall selling fish.
After the war, Ms. Gil worked as a hostess and singer in bars in South Korea. She married a man and learned from her mother-in-law how to make homemade rice wine to sell. She said she left the man and underwent a hysterectomy to remove ovarian cysts she blamed on the operation done by the Japanese doctor when she was a teenager.
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When Ms. Gil was nearly 30, she adopted a son and opened a food stand. 'I would just spin in circles around my room and say, 'Thank you, God, for giving a son to a wretch like me,'' she said.
In 2017, Ms. Gil released a recording of songs, 'Gil Won-ok's Peace,' and her life story was adapted into a book, 'Have You Ever Wished for a Soldier to Become an Angel?' (2018), by South Korean author Kim Sum.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Gil often thanked other survivors of the Japanese military abuses for giving her to courage to share her story. 'I couldn't have survived for all these years,' she said, 'by carrying all those memories with me.'
